age was but little impaired. He not only remembered the incidents of his childhood and youth*, but the events of latter years; and so faithful was his memory to him, that his son has informed me he never heard him tell the same story twice, but to different persons, and in different companies. His eye-sight failed him, many years before his death, but his hearing was uniformly perfect and unimpaired. His appetite was good till within a few days before his death. He generally ate a hearty breakfast of a pint of tea or coffee, as soon as he got out of his bed, with bread and butter in pro

*It is remarkable that the incidents of childhood and youth are seldom remembered or called forth until old age. I have sometimes been led, from this and other circumstances, to suspect that nothing is ever lost that is lodged in the memory, however it may be buried for a time by a variety of causes. How often do we find the transactions of early life, which we had reason to suppose were lost from the mind for ever, revived in our memories by certain accidental sights or sounds, particularly by certain notes or airs in music. I have known a young man speak French fluently when drunk, that could not put two sentences of that language together, when sober. He had been taught it perfectly, when a boy, but had forgotten it from disuse. A French countess was nursed by a Welsh woman, from whom she learned to speak her language, which she soon forgot, after she had acquired the French, which was her mother tongue. In the delirium of a fever, many years afterwards, she was heard to mutter words which none of her family or attendants understood. An old Welsh woman came to see her, who soon perceived that the sounds which were so unintelligible to the family, were the Welsh language. When she recovered, she could not recollect a single word of the language, she had spoken in her sickness. I can conceive great advantages may be derived from this retentive power in our memories, in the advancement of the mind towards perfection in knowledge (so essential to its happiness) in a future world.

PP

portion. He ate likewise at eleven o'clock, and never failed to eat plentifully at dinner of the grossest solid food. He drank tea, in the evening, but never ate any supper: he had lost all his teeth thirty years before his death, which was occasioned, his son says, by drawing excessive hot smoke of tobacco into his mouth: but the want of suitable mastication of his food, did not prevent its speedy digestion, nor impair his health. Whether the gums, hardened by age, supplied the place of his teeth in a certain degree, or whether the juices of the mouth and stomach became so much more acrid by time, as to perform the office of dissolving the food more speedily and more perfectly, I know not, but I have often observed, that old people are most disposed to excessive eating, and that they suffer fewest inconveniences from it. He was inquisitive after news in the last years of his life. His education did not lead him to increase the stock of his ideas any other way. But it is a fact well worth attending to, that old age, instead of diminishing, always increases the desire of knowledge. It must afford some consolation to those who expect to be old, to discover, that the infirmities to which the decays of nature expose the human body, are rendered more tolerable by the enjoyments that are to be derived from the appetite for sensual and intellectual food.

He was remarkably sober and temperate. Neither hard labour, nor company, nor the usual afflictions of human life, nor the wastes of nature, ever led him to an improper or excessive use of strong drink. For the last twenty-five years of his life, he drank twice every day of toddy, made with two table spoonfuls of spirit, in half a pint of water. His son, a man of fifty-nine years of age, told me that he had never seen him intoxicated. The time and manner in which he used spiritous liquors, I believe, contributed to lighten the

weight of his years, and probably to prolong his life. "Give wine to him that is of a heavy heart, and strong drink to him that is ready to perish with age, as well as with sickness. Let him drink and forget his sorrow, and remember his misery no more."

He enjoyed an uncommon share of health, insomuch that in the course of his long life he never was confined more than three days to his bed. He often declared that he had no idea of that most distressing pain called the head ache. His sleep

was interrupted a little in the last years of his life with a defluxion on his breast, which produced what is commonly called the old man's cough.

The character of this aged citizen was not summed up in his negative quality of temperance: he was a man of the most amiable temper: old age had not curdled his blood; he was uniformly cheerful and kind to every body; his religious principles were as steady as his morals were pure. He attended public worship about thirty years in the Rev. Dr. Sproat's church, and died in a full assurance of a happy immortality. The life of this man is marked with several circumstances, which perhaps have seldom occurred in the life of an individual events. He saw and heard more of those events which are measured by time, than have ever been seen or heard by any name since the age of the patriarchs; he saw the same spot of earth, which at one period of his life, was covered with wood and bushes, and the receptacle of beasts and birds of prey, afterwards become the seat of a city not only the first in wealth and arts in the new, but rivalling in both, many of the first cities in the old world. He saw regular streets where he once pursued a hare : he saw churches rising upon morasses, where he had often heard the croak

ing of frogs; he saw wharfs and ware-houses, where he had often seen Indian savages draw fish from the river for their daily subsistence; and he saw ships of every size and use in in those streams, where he had often seen nothing but Indian canoes; he saw a stately edifice filled with legislators, astonishing the world with their wisdom and virtue, on the same spot, probably, where he had seen an Indian council fire; he saw the first treaty ratified between the newly confederated powers of America and the ancient monarchy of France, with all the formalties of parchment and seals, on the same spot, probably, where he once saw William Penn ratify his first and last treaty with the Indians, without the formality of pen, ink or paper; he saw all the intermediate stages through which a people pass, from the most simple to the highest degrees of civilization. He saw the beginning and end of the empire of Great-Britain, in Pennsylvania. He had been the subject of seven successive crowned heads, and afterwards became a willing citizen of a republic; for he embraced the liberties and independence of America in his withered arms, and triumphed in the last years of his life in the salvation of his country.

*

REMARKABLE CIRCUMSTANCES IN THE CONSTITUTION AND LIFE OF ANN WOODS, AN OLD WOMAN OF 96 YEARS OF

AGE.

N the summer of the year 1788, while I was engaged in collecting the facts upon the subject of old

I age,

which

I have since published,* a poor woman came to my house to beg for cold victuals. Perceiving by her countenance, and the stoop in her walk, that she was very old, I requested her to sit down by me, while I recorded the following information, which I received from her, and which was confirmed to me a few days afterwards, by one of her daughters with whom she lived. Her name was Ann Woods. Her age at that time was 96. She was born in Herefordshire, in England, and came to this city when she was but ten years old, where she had lived ever since. She had been twice married. By her first husband, William Dickson, she had nine children, four of whom were then living. By her second husband, Joseph Woods, whom she married after she was sixty years old, she had one child, born within ten months after her marriage. There were intervals of two and nearly three years between each of her children. Three died soon after weaning them at the usual age in which children are taken from the breast. This led her to suckle her other children during the whole time of her pregnancy, and in several instances, she suckled two of them, born in succession to each other, at the same

*Medical Enquiries and Observations. vol. 2.

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